Configuring software applications can be a difficult task. The difficulty in configuring such systems grows in complexity as the size of the software application increases. An example of a complex software application to configure is an enterprise resource planning (“ERP”) application. Efforts to configure such applications often involve a large number of employees and even consultants. These efforts may string out over many months, and even multiple years. Further, modifying a large software application configuration or upgrading such an application can, depending on the size of the configuration modification project or scope of the application upgrade, may involve equal amounts of time and cost as an initial implementation.
A major cause for the complexity of modifying and upgrading such software applications is that configuration settings are often stored in configuration tables. The configurations settings in these tables typically do not provide any context of what the configuration settings are for, other than by reference to a manual or from the experience of person modifying the setting. Further, when modifying an existing configuration, care must be taken not to disrupt incomplete processes, such as unfulfilled product orders that include contractual terms that cannot be violated. Removing a configuration from a productive environment often causes such issues. As a result, processes may break and not be able to complete or, worse yet, cause an organization to incur legal liability. Thus, modifying application configurations is time consuming and expensive and data fixes to existing processes are often needed after a configuration change.